Evergreen Documentation Interest Group: Can you DIG it?

This is a summary that was posted to the three Evergreen discussion lists (general, documentation, and development) about the exciting momentum gathering around Evergreen documentation.

The key take-away: the Evergreen community now has a Documentation Interest Group!Â There will be an online meeting 3 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday, June 10, to discuss initial roles and tasks — if you’re interested, sign up.

Most day-to-day discussions about the Evergreen documentation project will take place on the Evergreen documentation list (though news of note may be posted to this blog and other lists on occasion). To subscribe to open-ils-documentation (or other Evergreen lists), see http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php

More about the DIG Project
On Wednesday, May 20, 2009, at the Evergreen International Conference, close to two dozen members of the Evergreen community participated in a documentation planning discussion.

Following a presentation about documentation (see notes below), the group took the following actions and (unanimously) made the following commitments:

* Established an Evergreen Documentation Interest Group, aka DIG, or even, the DIGgers
* Agreed to meet regularly to plan and implement the Evergreen documentation project
* Agreed that core Evergreen documentation should be based on one single-source, standards-based, open format
* Agreed that DocBook was the format of choice for Evergreen documentation
* Agreed that community members could contribute documentation in any format, and the DIG would convert to DocBook format as required
* Agreed that the initial organizing meetings should clarify roles and tasks
* Agreed that Karen Schneider and Paul Weiss would lead this project at this point in time

Some of the earliest activities for the DIG will include establishing a timeline and a regular meeting schedule, and identifying initial tasks for project participants and recruiting for each role. Some of the preliminary groundwork for the project, once volunteers have committed to specific areas, will include identifying a core DocBook subset of tags for Evergreen documentation, writing an Evergreen style (markup) guide, developing heavily-annotated model templates, and providing toolset advice.